Dating Roundup #10: Gendered Expectations

Posted on January 12, 2026 by TheZvi

The game is asymmetrical. Life is not fair. Doesn’t matter. Play to win the game.

You’re Single Because Your Emotions Gave Her The Ick

Ah, the ultimate ick source. A man expressing their emotions is kind of the inverse of the speech in Barbie about how it’s impossible to be a woman.

It’s easy. A man must be in touch with and transparent about his emotions, but must also be in conscious control over them, without repressing them, while choosing strategically when to be and not be transparent about them, and ultimately be fine, such that we will also be fine if all that information we shared can then be shared with others or used as a weapon.

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Claude Codes

Posted on January 9, 2026 by TheZvi

Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is so hot right now. The cool kids use it for everything.

They definitely use it for coding, often letting it write all of their code.

They also increasingly use it for everything else one can do with a computer.

Vas suggests using Claude Code as you would a mini-you/employee that lives in your computer and can do literally anything.

There’s this thread of people saying Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is AGI in various senses. I centrally don’t agree, but they definitely have a point.

If you’d like, you can use local Claude Code via Claude Desktop, documentation here. It’s a bit friendlier than the terminal and some people like it a lot more. Here is a more extensive basic discussion of setup options. The problem is the web interface still lacks some power user functions, even after some config work Daniel San misses branch management, create new repository directory via ‘new’ and import plugins from marketplaces.

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AI #150: While Claude Codes

Posted on January 8, 2026 by TheZvi

Claude Code is the talk of the town, and of the Twitter. It has reached critical mass.

Suddenly, everyone is talking about how it is transforming their workflows. This includes non-coding workflows, as it can handle anything a computer can do. People are realizing the power of what it can do, building extensions and tools, configuring their setups, and watching their worlds change.

I’ll be covering that on its own soon. This covers everything else, including ChatGPT Health and the new rounds from xAI and Anthropic.

Table of Contents

  1. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Even Rufus, Amazon’s Choice.
  2. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. They don’t believe you.
     
Continue reading →
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Advancements In Self-Driving Cars

Posted on January 7, 2026 by TheZvi

Going Full San Francisco

Waymo goes Full San Francisco West Bay except for SFO:

Jeff Dean: Exciting expansion! @Waymo now serves the whole SF Bay Area Peninsula from SF to San Jose and is taking riders on freeways.

They can serve SJC, and SFO is almost ready, employee rides are in place and public rides are ‘coming soon.’

Brandan: Would be nice if @Waymo comes across the bay to Berkeley!

Jeff Dean: We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!

Going Down The Highway

Waymo is going to start using freeways in Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco. That’s a big deal for longer rides, but there is still the problem that Waymos have to obey the technical speed limit. On freeways no huamn driver does this, so obeying the technical speed limit is both slower and more dangerous. We are going to need a regulatory solution, ideally that allows you to drive at the average observed speed.

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Fertility Roundup #6: The Art of More Dakka

Posted on January 6, 2026 by TheZvi

The central message of the fertility roundups has always been that we have a choice.

If we do want to raise fertility, we can do that. People respond to incentives. That means money, especially if paid up front, and it also means time, lifestyle and respect.

If we do it purely with cash, it would be expensive, but a well-designed version of this would still be net profitable to the state. On the order of $300k per additional live birth would get this done in the United States, depending on how you structure it. This is not money spent, it is money transferred, and it helps the kids quite a lot.

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Dos Capital

Posted on January 5, 2026 by TheZvi

This week, Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel wrote Capital in the 22nd Century.

One of my goals for Q1 2026 is to write unified explainer posts for all the standard economic debates around potential AI futures in a systematic fashion. These debates tend to repeatedly cover the same points, and those making economic arguments continuously assume you must be misunderstanding elementary economic principles, or failing to apply them for no good reason. Key assumptions are often unstated and even unrealized, and also false or even absurd. Reference posts are needed.

That will take longer, so instead this post covers the specific discussions and questions around the post by Trammell and Patel. My goal is to both meet that post on its own terms, and also point out the central ways its own terms are absurd, and the often implicit assumptions they make that are unlikely to hold.

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Fertility Roundup #5: Causation

Posted on January 2, 2026 by TheZvi

There are two sides of developments in fertility.

  1. How bad is it? What is causing the massive, catastrophic declines in fertility?
  2. What can we do to stabilize and reverse these trends to a sustainable level?

Today I’m going to focus on news about what is happening and why, and next time I’ll ask what we’ve learned since last check-in about we could perhaps do about it.

One could consider all this a supplement to my sequence on The Revolution of Rising Expectations, and The Revolution of Rising Requirements. That’s the central dynamic.

Household Composition

What is happening? A chart worth looking at every so often.

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AI #149: 3

Posted on January 1, 2026 by TheZvi

The Rationalist Project was our last best hope that we might not try to build it.

It failed.

But in the year of the Coding Agent, it became something greater: our last, best hope – for everyone not dying.

This is what 2026 looks like. The place is Lighthaven.

Table of Contents

  1. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. 2026 is an age of wonders.
  2. Claude Code. The age of humans writing code may be coming to an end.
  3. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Your dog’s dead, Jimmy.
  4. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Keep your nonsense simple.
  5. Fun With Media Generation. YouTube facing less AI slop than I’d expect.
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2025 Year in Review

Posted on December 31, 2025 by TheZvi

It’s that time. It’s been a hell of a year.

At the start we barely had reasoning models. Now we have Claude Code and Opus 4.5.

I don’t code. Yet now I cause code to exist whenever something about a website annoys me, or when I get that programmer’s realization that there’s something I am planning on doing at least three times. Because why not?

The progress has simultaneously been mind bogglingly impressive and fast. But a lot of people don’t see it that way, because progress has been incremental, and because we were reasonably expecting to often get even more than this.

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Dating Roundup #9: Signals and Selection

Posted on December 30, 2025 by TheZvi

Ultimately, it comes down to one question. Are you in? For you, and for them.

You’re Single Because They Got The Ick

The Ick, the ultimate red flag, makes perfect sense and is all about likelihood ratios.

Koenfucius: The ‘ick’ is a colloquial term for a feeling of disgust triggered by a specific—typically trivial—behaviour from a romantic partner, often leading to the relationship’s demise. New research explores why some are more prone to getting it than others.

Robin Hanson: “Women also experienced the ick more frequently, with 75% having had the ick compared to 57% of men … Those with a higher tendency for disgust … [&] grandiose narcissism was linked to stronger ick reactions, as was holding partners to exceptionally high standards.”

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